1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic mail messaging, and, more particularly, to providing a portion of an electronic mail message at a reduced resolution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail has become a central feature of modern life and users have come to expect to receive electronic mail messages at any time and in virtually any place. For example, during the course of one day of travel, a user may receive electronic mail messages at a home desktop computer in the early morning, an office desktop computer in midmorning, via a cell phone or personal digital assistant in a taxi on the way to the airport, on a laptop computer via a wireless local area network while waiting in the airport lounge, via an in-flight telephone on the airplane, and in a hotel room via a high-speed Internet connection provided by the hotel at the end of the day.
Thus, depending on the circumstances, electronic mail messages may be transmitted and/or received by a wide variety of devices at any given time. In addition to the aforementioned end-user devices, such as desktop computers, laptop computers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, and the like, electronic mail messages typically also pass through a variety of network servers, network switches, hubs, routers, transmission lines, wireless transmission media, modems, interface cards, and the like. The transfer rates of these devices and/or media can vary by many orders of magnitude. For example, a laptop computer's modem may be limited to a transfer rate of 56K bits per second, a cable modem may easily provide data at a transfer rate of 1-2 megabits per second, and a T-3 connection may provide data at a transfer rate as high as 40 megabits per second.
The complexity and size of electronic mail messages has increased roughly in proportion with the available transfer rate. Early electronic mail message systems relied upon comparatively slow modems and thus these electronic mail messages were typically limited to short ASCII text documents. Modern electronic mail messaging systems, on the other hand, may utilize high-speed connections to transmit documents containing complex formatting, audio, graphics, video, and the like. For example, a user may send and/or receive an electronic mail messages with a PowerPoint attachment including formatted text, images, and animations. For another example, a user with the appropriate licenses may send and/or receive a feature length movie as an electronic mail message. The size of these files may easily exceed several megabytes, and users may expect to transmit even larger files in the future.
Despite the advantages of using high-speed connections to transmit large information-rich electronic mail messages, the same messages can become problematic when they must be transmitted by a lower speed connection. For example, a user reading electronic mail messages on a laptop computer connected to the Internet via a 14.4K dial-up modem may have to wait an inordinate amount of time for a large electronic mail message to be downloaded through the modem. As another example, a user writing electronic messages on the laptop computer connected to the Internet via a 14.4 KB dial-up modem may want to attach a large document to an electronic mail message, but may have to wait an unreasonable amount of time for the electronic mail message to be uploaded through the modem. In addition, bottlenecks, heavy traffic, device malfunctions, severed transmission lines, geomagnetic storms, and the like can dramatically, and often unpredictably, decrease the transfer rate of even the highest speed networks. Consequently, the user may have to wait an unreasonable amount of time to receive any indication of the content of the electronic mail message, including any attached files.
Moreover, it may be difficult for the user to determine what information may be contained in the electronic mail message without receiving the entire message. For example, conventional electronic mail messaging systems are not typically able to play audio files in electronic mail message attachments unless the entire message has been received by the user. For another example, conventional electronic mail messaging systems are not typically able to display graphics files, such as films and/or animations, in electronic mail message attachments unless the entire message has been received by the user. This problem is exacerbated by the virtually unlimited number of formats, such as Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Video for Windows, Apple Quicktime®, AVI, and the like, available for the files that may be included in the attachments.
The present invention is directed to addressing, or at least reducing, the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.